Disease Detector

Everyone dreads getting sick during flu season. Wouldn't it be helpful if you knew who is getting sick around your area? Now you can with Disease Detector!

Disease Detector tracks and maps reports of illness from the social media network Twitter. Whenever someone publicly posts a tweet about their sickness, our app collects those tweets and extracts important information. There are two different map interfaces that users can view sickness activity.

The first map is a Marker Map. This map places a marker on the location where someone tweeted about their sickness. Clicking on a marker opens up an info window that displays the Twitter handle, keywords from the tweet, the location, and the date posted. Currently, the Marker Map only displays markers in the state of Illinois.

The second map is a Heat Map. This map aggregates a cluster of markers into a distribution of colors indicating the level of sickness activity in an area. The gradient of colors ranges from green to yellow to red. Low activity shows up as green. Intermediate activity shows up as yellow. And high activity shows up as red. Currently, the Heat Map displays data for the United States.


This app was created by Soham Saha, Keshav Shivam, and Rishi Jaiti to present at the 2018 Engineering Open House at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.